Trump Has Found A More Constitution-Free Zone Than Guantanamo
For two decades, the US military base at Guantanamo Bay has been a preferred spot to indefinitely detain individuals the US government does not like, mostly accused terrorists. In most cases these are folks the government would like to imprison for life but whom they don't want to have tried in the US, either because they don't really want to try to prove their accusations or due to public backlash against repatriating some admittedly bad folks. Whatever the reasons, the net effect is a Constitution-free zone where things we take for granted like due process and habeas corpus don't obtain.
President Obama and his supporters disliked the situation enough to try to reduce the Gitmo population, but he was not willing to bear the political cost of "soft-on-terror" accusations that inevitably come from certain quarters whenever it is suggested someone incarcerated for over 10 years should have access to due process and a fair trial. Trump on the other hand seems to love the Constitution-free zone, notwithstanding the hypocrisy of this following years of criticism of the Department of Justice for incarcerating certain January 6 rioters without trial. At the beginning of his term he publicly told the folks down in Gitmo to get ready for 50,000 new inmates, seeing it as a place he could expatriate immigrants (initially presumed to be the illegal ones but since then immigrants with valid green cards and student visas but engaging in un-loved speech).
But apparently he has found an even better place -- the CECOT prison in El Salvador. We are seeing now that this is one step even beyond Gitmo -- while judges seem to have only limited reach into Gitmo, they do have some. But they have no reach into El Salvador.
Trump is telling the Salvadoran President that once he is done with illegal immigrants, he is going to start sending "homegrown" criminals. Via Reason:
President Donald Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office yesterday and said his innermost thoughts out loud: "Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places [like the CECOT prison]. It's not big enough."
"Yeah, we've got space," Bukele responded. Administration officials chuckled in the background. "I'm talking about violent people," Trump had said a few minutes earlier. "I'm talking about really bad people."
"We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters," said Trump.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is reportedly considering legal mechanisms by which Trump could send American citizens to El Salvador's infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo.
I struggle to find any historical precedent for this craziness. Bottany Bay and Georgia come to mind, but those were still under the administrative control of the government that was shipping out criminals.
One of the appeals of Trump has been that he has no equity in the system, and thus is willing to challenge the entrenched mess much of government has become. And if Trump had stuck with DOGE and tweaking government bureaucrats, I would have been entertained. But the downside of having no equity in the system (combined I think with his age) is that rules and precedents are as meaningful to him as the rules of war are to a guerilla fighter. I don't think he give a sh*t about setting bad precedents and this is an absolutely awful precedent.
I know there are many Trump supporters that will disagree with me and cheer him on. They are frustrated with cities that give violent crime a pass and I am sympathetic. But perhaps this is one way to explain the problem to them: I believe that President Biden's justice department went overboard on prosecution, over-sentencing, and incarceration of January 6 rioters/protesters. But if President Biden had decided to follow this Salvadoran incarceration idea himself, then likely there would be hundreds, maybe thousands of Trump supporters sitting in a Salvadoran prison and there would be zero Republicans could do about it now. Trump loves Salvadoran incarceration because no pardon and no judge can touch them, but the same would be true if his January 6 supporters had been sent down there too. Trump's pardons would all have been moot, because pardoned or not it would be as hard to get them back out of CECOT as it is to get innocent US citizens out of Putin's political-hostage prisons. One of the reasons we are extremely careful with the death penalty (and why I think it should be banned all together) is that there is no appeal or reversal possible once a person is executed. We are facing the same situation with shipments to El Salvador, and unfortunately Trump considers that a feature not a bug.
Coyote,
Your points are very well taken, though I have trouble following your position on securing an individual's return from CECOT versus, for example, Putin's political-hostage prisons. The Trump administration's shipment of purported illegal immigrants to CECOT is the result of a negotiated agreement between the United States and El Salvador. I've not thoroughly reviewed evidence concerning those negotiations (if any exists), but reports suggest that the Trump administration paid $6 million to El Salvador to house these individuals. That's a far cry from a foreign adversary's political-hostage prison. I think it contravenes reason to suggest that President Trump could not easily secure the return of Mr. Garcia (and others whose challenges for habeus relief in the respective jurisdictions in which they were detained will be successful). Indeed, the Biden administration was able to secure a one for one prisoner swap with Russia in 2022--Brittney Greiner, a WNBA player, for Viktor Bout, a known arms dealer. I take no position here on the prudence of that decision.
All this to say: It shouldn't be, and likely isn't, difficult for the administration to secure the release of Mr. Garcia, regardless of this administration's dubious argument concerning the United States' ability to effectuate (excuse me, "facilitate") the return of a "foreign national."
"One of the reasons we are extremely careful with the death penalty (and why I think it should be banned all together) is that there is no appeal or reversal possible once a person is executed"
An even better reason is that if one cannot trust the government to take the right decision on something as trivial as a tariff, the government cannot be trusted to take a decision involving the life and death of an individual.
I agree that trump has crossed the rubikon where legitimacy is concerned, and that housing prisoners in third countries through questionable legal constructs is beyond the pale and unacceptable for a lawful nation.
That said, the agreement about that prison states that the final disposition of inmates is up to the US, and even if Bukele changed his mind, the US has many ways to exercise influence about decisions here, starting from asking nicely all the way to using military force.
It is thus a question of will, which is obviously lacking.
Our current rulers have demonstrated that they not only don't mind grabbing random people and doing with them as they like without any due process, they are also determined to not let judges or supreme court orders get in the way of their absolute power, including interference with an admitted mistake.
As such, the argument of "they could do that to you anytime, too" is valid, but the conservative bet here is "we'll get to abuse others and won't be exposed to the downsides of but instead benefit from a dictatorial regime".
The question everyone has to answer for themselves is really "am I ok with ditching the constitution and history of America for being part of the new authoritarian movement" and then act accordingly.
'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
It just seems like an over reaction to the over reaction the other way. I see no moral high ground on any side. I am just old now and work for free at the VFW fund raising flea market. We cannot give away children’s books for free. The world is reaping what it has sown. Keep on trucking. Tom